Will Cain didn’t hold back many opinions about the sports media in a new interview with Outkick’s Bobby Burack.
One particularly interesting discussion came after Burack stated he feels sports media is “broken” and leans too far left for its own good. Cain, agreed and said that it is important to diagnose why that is, otherwise “we’ll soon be doing an autopsy on why sports media killed its audience totally.”
“First, the media in general, suffers from a self-selection mechanism. Most people that choose to go into media share somewhat of a similar worldview,” Cain says. “On top of that, most major media companies are situated geographically in the Northeast corner of the United States, which also shares that same worldview. So you’re already fishing from a pond of people who, not exclusively, but generally think the same way.”
Cain added that another reason he feels conservative voices are frozen out of sports media is social media reaction, a regular target of Outkick columns. He called the Twitter-sphere “a vortex that makes everyone think that one singular point of view is rational, smart, correct, and reflects the audience. And anybody outside of that point of view they call a contrarian for contrarian’s sake, an attention seeker, or more recently, a racist.”
Interestingly, while Cain does call out leadership at sports media outlets, he notes that leadership across corporate America is “failing” and giving into the loudest voices they hear.
“They’re sacrificing their bottom line. They’re sacrificing their fidelity to the shareholder. They’re sacrificing their ratings,” Cain says of sports media executives. “In some sad cases, and I know this because I get the private text messages, I get the private calls, they’re sacrificing their own values out of fear of being branded something they are not.”